Reel Beach: Halloween is the day to honour some classic horror movies filmed in Toronto

By BERNIE FLETCHER

Halloween on Oct. 31 is a time for frightful films.

Halloween is a fun night, but All Hallows’ Eve once was a time of year to remember lost souls and the dearly departed. People celebrated by wearing costumes to ward off ghosts and evil spirits.

If you passed the Ashbridge Estate on Queen Street East last spring, you may have seen a graveyard spring up overnight, complete with crypts and headstones. Don’t worry, no one was dying to get into “Roosevelt Cemetery.” It was just one of many film sets in the city.

This was for the batty vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows (Mondays on FX) which premiered its sixth and farewell season on Oct. 21.

It may be Halloween, but for vampires every day is “Fangs-giving”. Get out your wooden stakes and cloves of garlic!

Oddly enough there once was an actual Ashbridge burial ground at Queen Street East and Woodfield Road.

Sets for the Emmy-winning comedy included a mansion and weird topiary on Eastern Avenue in the Studio District. Filming took place in Leslieville, at Woodbine Beach and on Kingston Road. The original vampire lair was filmed at historic Cranfield House (circa 1902) on Pape Avenue which was also a location for Stephen King’s killer clown movie It (2018).

Pennywise the evil clown is back in the It prequel Welcome to Derry (HBO, 2025) set in the 1960s and recently filmed in Port Hope and Toronto.

What is it about clowns? Just don’t say “Beetlejuice” three times.

Director David Cronenberg is the father of “body horror” with films like The Fly (1986) and Dead Ringers (1988). His new film, The Shrouds, deals with loss and grief. A high-tech cemetery allows mourners to see their loved ones, a “tomb with a view.” Remains to be seen? Beethoven decomposing?

At this year’s TIFF, Cronenberg was presented with the Norman Jewison Career Achievement Award.
In his memoir Jewison himself wrote, “I love cemeteries. Whenever I travel, I search them out. Most of my movies have a cemetery in them or a funeral or at least a body…In Moonstruck, my directing credit appears over a shot of an old man laid out in his coffin—an inside joke appreciated by all.”

The late director always liked a good “plot.”

As a kid growing up in the Beach, Jewison loved to act out death scenes, “maybe everybody is fascinated by death.”

His father, Percy, would sometimes ride around in a hearse with his friend William Sherrin of Sherrin Funeral Home on Kingston Road at Beech Avenue (now the site of the YMCA).

Toronto has long been home to horror movies. Black Christmas (1974) filmed at the old police station on Main Street which is now Centre 55. In Prom Night (1980) a fiery van crashes over the Bluffs. Dawn of the Dead (2004) had a boat explosion at Ashbridges Bay as the undead chased Sarah Polley.

You may have spotted St. John’s Norway Cemetery in Cocktail (1988), The Virgin Suicides (1999) or To Die For (1995) where David Cronenberg makes a lethal cameo.

Guillermo del Toro loves monsters, carrying on the scary tradition with films like The Shape of Water (2017). Watch out for the R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant in Mimic (1997) and Nightmare Alley (2021).

The director’s latest project is Frankenstein (Netflix, 2025) which just wrapped filming. Mary Shelley’s gothic Frankenstein (1818) is his favourite novel. Just don’t call the lurching creature Frankenstein. That’s actually the name of the doctor who created him.

One of the sets is a massive, 19th century sailing ship in the water beside the studio. Del Toro tweeted a photo of the ship, joking, “Looks like somebody parked on my spot.”

Del Toro’s favourite part of the city is the east end. He has lived in the Beach and Leslieville and often tweets about local businesses with shout-outs to The Great Escape bookstore on Kingston Road (“fun and guided by love of books”) and the Fox (”I love repertory theatre”).

The Mexican filmmaker has said there are enough monsters out there in the real world these days.

The nightly news is scary enough for me. If you want to see the real-life creation of a “monster” catch the made-in-Toronto film The Apprentice about ruthless Roy Cohn mentoring a young Donald Trump. Yikes!

There is one scene filmed outside at the Main Square apartments at Main Street and Danforth Avenue.

Off in the distance a wolf howls—or maybe it’s just a dog barking. This is the Beach after all.

Happy Halloween!